Space junk damages International Space Station's robot arm
- Reference: 1622529854
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2021/06/01/iss_canadarm2_space_junk_collision/
- Source link:
The second-generation robotic arm, officially titled the Space Station Remote Manipulator System (SSRMS), is still operational but has a punctured thermal blanket and the boom is damaged underneath.
In a blog post, the CSA [1]said :
While the utmost precautions are taken to reduce the potential for collisions with the ISS, impacts with tiny objects do occur. One such hit was noticed recently during a routine inspection of Canadarm2 on May 12.
NASA and the CSA collaborated to photograph the damage and assess its impact. Thankfully, they've deemed the robot arm’s performance is unaffected.
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The Ding in Canadarm2. Image: CSA/NASA.
Click to enlarge
The Canadarm2 is a multi-jointed titanium robotic arm used to move objects like cargo shuttles outside the ISS, and to perform station maintenance. It has been attached to the ISS since April 2001.
Canadarm2 will continue with its duties, which include a planned operation to hoist Dextre, another Canadian remote manipulator, into position so it can replace a faulty power switchbox.
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A strike to the ISS by space debris seems unlucky but almost inevitable as astroboffins currently track over 23,000 pieces of low Earth orbit junk that is softball sized or larger. However, the offending item that hit the robotic arm was too small to be tracked.
US military commanders have recently [6]called for a framework for a rules-based order in space, and did so after the uncontrolled descent and Indian Ocean crash of a Chinese [7]Long March 5B booster stage in May 2021.
Jack Wright Nelson, a space law researcher from the National University of Singapore Faculty of Law told The Register :
The hole in Canadarm2 is minuscule compared to the hole in the international legal regime concerning space debris.
Nelson further explained that treaties complicate efforts to clean up outer space. He added:
This is because space objects, and their components remain under the jurisdiction and control of their State of Registry. So to remove a dead satellite – or any part of it – from orbit, you need to find this State and get their permission. Depending on the State and the purpose of the satellite, this permission may not be forthcoming.
Indeed, finding the owner of miniscule debris seems highly unlikely.
He referred to the prospects for comprehensive international space debris regulation as "dim" and stated:
The irony is that space will become wholly inaccessible to all of us if we do not resolve the space debris problem.
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[1] https://www.asc-csa.gc.ca/eng/iss/news.asp
[2] https://regmedia.co.uk/2021/06/01/canadarm2.jpg
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/science&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YLYFPC13GUwb-1nX5FYLigAAANU&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/science&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YLYFPC13GUwb-1nX5FYLigAAANU&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/science&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YLYFPC13GUwb-1nX5FYLigAAANU&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/07/space_debris_regulation/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/10/long_march_misses_people/
[8] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: It’s the SDoS!
You are ranting about the wrong constellation for Kessler syndrome. Even if you do blow up a Starlink satellite the bits big enough to break up a satellite are most likely to come down before they hit another Starlink. For Kessler you want to be a bit higher up so it takes much longer for the fragments to get back to Earth but not so high up that everything is too spaced out. OneWeb's proposed constellation is in the sweet spot for a cascade. Their satellites are much more shiny and spend more time visible before dawn and after dusk which is the most effective time to ruin astronomical observations.
Re: It’s the SDoS!
yet another of Musk’s brain-dead-children— it’s going to be a few years before space is unreachable and millennia before it’s reachable again
Musk's Starlink constellation is in a low earth orbit where there's a lot atmospheric drag. Those satellites generally start off at an altitude where but for their onboard ion thrusters pushing them to a higher orbit the drag would bring them down in as little as 30 days. In their higher operational orbit they would come down in a couple of years left to their own devices but with the thrusters they will last for 5 years or so before being deorbited.
They won't be in orbit for millennia. If you stopped launching them they would all be gone by 2030 and probably much much sooner.
The irony is that space will become wholly inaccessible to all of us if we do not resolve the space debris problem.
But that irony is not appreciated by humanity. We, as a species, are very busy to pollute and kill the world we live in. Then we go to space and continue the same behavior and pollute the orbit. Luckily we have not yet managed to go very much farther out. But everywhere humanity goes it seems to leave its garbage.
We should start by cleaning our local world and learn to leave no junk before we should be allowed to move anywhere else. Maybe humanity needs some alien foster parents to enforce the rules?
Maybe humanity needs some alien foster parents to enforce the rules?
Nuke it from orbit, right?
Make it a galactic highway
Make it a galactic highway and you'll find trash down the side of the road everywhere.
But how else are we supposed to let future Archaeologists determine how we lived, if we dont leave them our garbage piles to go rifling through??? I mean the romans were nice enough to leave their garbage pits lying around the place - how else do you think we know so much about them?
You mean, those future (alien) archeologists and anthropologists? They already know the result: Mostly harmless.
I thought it was amused to death.
What about making decomissionning of satellites internationally mandatory by sending them back to Earth for destruction in the atmosphere? No more junk left 'rotting' in space: operators would have to let some fuel aboard to remove the satellite, or to pay another operator to bring it down with an additional booster.
You'll need to clearly define 'satellite' in that context though.
Should NASA be forced to return the Voyager craft to Earth to avoid polluting intergalactic space??
There are already plenty of things being pushed (primarily by ESA) in this direction. Various devices for use even on small cube sats (which dont carry any fuel, so cant be de-orbited by the standard method) are being investigated and tested. Rules for bigger satellites to make sure they either de-orbit or push further out into graveyard orbits are being put in place.
However, the problem is :
a) other nations not signing up to these sorts of rules (usually because its expensive, but sometimes because they dont want what they send up coming back down and potentially surviving entry and being picked up by someone else, or simply they dont want to add burdens to potential customers and potentially drive them to other rocket launch suppliers (who dont impose additional burdens on them); and
b) the bigger problem, there is already so much shite up in space that is hundreds of years away from de-orbiting on its own. There's a lot of old booster upper stages, there's a lot of old satellites, and there's a ton of debris caused by both the Chinese anti-satellite missile test which destroyed a satellite in 2007, and the collision between the Iridium and the Kosmos satellites back in 2009.
Trying not to add more debris up there, and taking away what you bring with you (de-orbiting) is great, but at the moment, the situation is akin to having a picnic in a garbage dump. Just because you're trying not to add to the pile, doesnt mean your chosen picnic spot is going to suddenly become a childrens playground...
How is this going to be enforced? Where do you draw the limit? Constellations like starlink and some other satellites operate at an altitude where they'll re-enter in months at most. Re-entering geostationary satellites would be a giant drain on resources to the point geo satellites would be uneconomical as they'd have to consist mostly of fuel (they normally get moved to a parking orbit above geostationary where they'll stay out of the way for hundreds if not thousands of years)
There's also the issue that, even if all countries would agree to sign up for mandatory de-orbiting of end-of-use satellites, there's still the chance that a satellite gets damaged by an impactor and can no longer be de-orbited.
Back to square one on that.
the robot arm’s performance is unaffected.
Perhaps, but a couple of feet to one side would have been a strike on the joint... and how far before it would have left a hole for the vacuum to get into somewhere important?
Re: the robot arm’s performance is unaffected.
They were lucky that no cabling was cut I guess. I assume that patching / soldering in space isn't easy
Re: the robot arm’s performance is unaffected.
The ISS itself has far better debris shielding and an impact there would likely have been equally uneventful. Canadarm is basically unshielded in that regard (only thermal blankets) as it's original design parameters were that it would be shielded inside the Space Shuttle cargo bay most of the time and only deployed "in harms way" for limited time.
It would have been vastly more dangerous if something like this happens while one of the astronauts is outside of the station on EVA..
CSA goes all Monty Python
Tis but a scratch!
Re: CSA goes all Monty Python
Ni.
Re: CSA goes all Monty Python
They’ll be wanting a schwubbery up there next.
How
Do we know it was our space junk? Could have been the junk left over from the construction of the pretty circulating balls of stuff.
Re: How
Well I think it is safe to assume that, given the amount of junk we are responsible for having put up there, there's a good chance that the impactor was our fault.
Tiny rocks do travel in space, obviously, but they tend to come in swarms and are generally accompanied by bigger rocks that astronomers can find and track.
But, in the absolute, statistically speaking, yes, it could have been a very small meteorite on its way to Earth's atmosphere.
It’s the SDoS!
So it seems that humanity will not become a space-dwelling species any time soon: with a couple of apocalyptically idiotic “satellite constellations” (*) underway —most notably yet another of Musk’s brain-dead-children— it’s going to be a few years before space is unreachable and millennia before it’s reachable again.
It’s the Space DoS and it’s not even clever or ingenious: it’s just junk pile-up.
(*) Which if by any stroke of luck they won’t self destruct in a massive chain reaction, they at least would make sky observation from the planet’s surface a lot more miserable —and as cool as space telescopes are, ground based ones are the bleeding edge ones.